[thwarted]

This feels like a rediscovering/rewording of Kernighan's Law:

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." ~ Brian Kernighan

[leptons]

It's an old saying, I think Einstein is cited most often for it... something like this according to Google:

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."